OMG! Ubuntu!

Those using Ubuntu on Windows through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) may be interested to know that ‘significant updates’ are on the way. In a blog post to recap things discussed as the recent Microsoft BUILD event the company’s senior product manager for the Windows developer platform Craig Loewen runs though what’s coming down the pipe for WSL users. Several experimental WSL features Mic…

Few computer keyboards are as iconic, as influential, or as beige as the IBM Model-M — no surprise then that it’s been given a modern reimagining courtesy of 8BitDo. Following on from Nintendo NES and Famicom and Commodore 64 homages, 8BitDo has unveiled its latest retro-inspired mechanical keyboard. This one is a homage to a true computing classic, putting a modern spin on the IBM Model-M keyboa…

This month’s Firefox 126 release brought with it a modest set of improvements for Linux users — as well as an annoying bug which temporarily breaks drag and drop actions in the browser. And that bug was easy to trigger: select some text or an image on a web page, then ‘drag’ it out but release (something I inadvertently do when browsing web pages quite often). Then, next time to you try to drag s…

Ubuntu 24.04 is now available for the Milk-V Mars RISC-V single board computer (SBC). RISC-V is an open-source processor spec. Anyone can access its design to create their own chips freely, without having to pay licensing fees or royalties. Much like a Linux distro, people are able to collaborate, contribute, and build on RISC-V in effort to improve it. And while ARM (which I’m sure you’ve heard …

Day Progress is a new GNOME Shell extension that does something appreciable simple: it displays a progress bar in the top panel to show how much of the day has passed. “A clock does that?”, you say — you’re not wrong my friend which is why this extension won’t appeal to everyone. But for some the visual cue it provides will be motivating — though in my case, it underscores how much time I waste b…

Cascadia Code is an open-source monospaced font made by Microsoft first released in 2020 and serves as the default typeface for the official Windows Terminal app. Similar to Intel’s One Mono, JetBrains’ Mono and IBM’s Plex, Cascadia Code is an clear, legible, modern monospaced font tailored for terminal and code editing and offering a wide range of programming ligatures. Earlier this mont the fon…

Rufus, a popular open-source tool for making bootable USB drives on Windows, just released an update that includes a ‘fix’ for working with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS ISOs. A truly versatile tool, Rufus is able to create bootable Windows installers from ISO files and disk images as well as Linux installers and, more pertinent to this news, persistent Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and Debian USB installers. Rufus 4.5…

Stop by the Snap Store website today you’ll see it’s undergone a revamp – the second design rejig to the online storefront in the past 12 months but more substantive than the first. The search bar is now shorter and incorporated into the header section (which also drops the “Search thousands of snaps used by millions of people across 41 Linux distributions” strap line its shown since 2019). The “…

It’s now possible to upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS from earlier versions officially, using the standard GUI mechanisms — no command-line developer flag required. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released on April 25 but the distro devs delayed direct upgrades to the new version due to bugs – one rather serious. Though those issues weren’t universal (lots of folks upgraded through the command-line without issue) th…

Wondering what sort of features Mozilla has planned for upcoming versions of its Firefox web browser? You needn’t wonder too hard; Mozilla has shared an updated roadmap on its ideas platform outlining its near-term priorities, features, and enhancements that its engineers are already or are soon to begin working on. And be excited, be-be excited as a number of tentpole new features are namechecke…

If you use Slack on Ubuntu and were frustrated that screen sharing under Wayland was only showing a black screen (or crashing the entire app entirely), you’ll be pleased to hear those issues are now fixed. I’m not a Slack user —who’d I talk to, myself?!— and while I hear that this popular chat platform works best in a Chromium-based web browser these days (some features don’t work in Mozilla Fire…

Of the (many) handy new features in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the ability to access OneDrive files through the Nautilus file manager as a remote mount. This is made possible by the msgraph package, a new gvfs backend that Nautilus can use, account integration through GNOME Online Accounts (GOA), and Microsoft giving GNOME the relevant permission and approvals. And while the file-access feature isn’t ob…